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Proteus 



A Rhapsody on Man 



By 

Edwin Miller Wheelock 



With a Biographical Note by 
Charles Kassel 



Chicago 

The Open Court Publishing Company 

London Agents 

Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co. 

1910 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 

pDWIN Miller Wheelock was born in the city 
of New York in 1829. After graduating from 
the Law Department of Harvard he took the 
theological course at the Divinity School of 
the same University, and in 1857 became the 
minister of the Unitarian Society at Dover, 
New Hampshire. 

In that pastorate he continued for five years, 
when, the Civil War breaking out, he resigned 
to enlist as a private in the Fifteenth New 
Hampshire Volunteers. This step, involving 
as it did a large measure of personal sacrifice, 
had its birth in a supreme sense of duty. He 
was by instinct and conviction an abolitionist. 
Two years before — stirred deeply by the tragic 
death of John Brown — he had delivered from 
his pulpit at Dover a discourse upon the event 
which attracted wide attention, and of which 
this passage has been preserved in Von Hoist's 
''Constitutional History of the United States": 
"John Brown is the first plague launched by 
Jehovah at the head of this immense and em- 
bodied wickedness. The rest will follow 'and 
then comes the end.' " The address was a 
striking testimony to Mr. Wheelock's fear- 



lessness and strength of conviction, and it is 
equally significant of his faithfulness to his 
own highest ideal that, when the crucial hour 
struck, he did not falter before the exchange 
of scholarly ease for the hardship of military 
service. 

Made chaplain shortly after his enlistment, 
Mr. Wheelock accompanied his regiment to 
New Orleans. There his courage and human- 
ity marked him at once to General Banks as 
peculiarly fitted for the delicate and difficult 
tasks which centered about the protection and 
the education of the enfranchised blacks. In 
connection with Rev. George H. Hepworth, 
he was commissioned as lieutenant and de- 
tailed to investigate complaints of abuse and 
ill treatment toward the plantation negroes, 
and subsequently was made the active member 
of the military board for the establishment of 
Freedmen's Schools in Louisiana. His ad- 
ministration of these trusts earned for him the 
warm commendation of the Commanding Gen- 
eral. 

Mr. Wheelock's high character did much 
at this stage of the War to stay criticism of 
the labor and educational system which had 
been instituted in Louisiana by the military 
authorities and with which his own name was 
prominently identified. "Another indictment 
constantly reiterated against Mr. Lincoln," we 
are told in the life of William Lloyd Garrison 
written by his children and recently published 



by the Century Co., "was his assent to the 
labor system established in Louisiana by Gen- 
eral Banks, who was accused of having forced 
the freedmen back under their old masters and 
reduced them to a state of serfdom scarcely 
better than slavery. Mr. Garrison refused 
to accept these assertions until he could in- 
vestigate the matter and it subsequently ap- 
peared that they were altogether unjust and 
exaggerated. The labor system, which insured 
employment at fair wages to the men and pro- 
vision and shelter for their families, saved 
hundreds from the demoralization and death 
which decimated them when they swarmed 
about the Union Camps, and the educational 
system which went in hand with it gave in- 
struction to more than eleven thousand chil- 
dren. Both departments were under the charge 
of radical abolitionists and friends of Mr. Gar- 
rison, Major B. Rush Plumly of Philadelphia 
and Rev. Edwin M. Wheelock of New Hamp- 
shire." 

The war ending, Mr. Wheelock removed 
with his family to Texas. Here, during what 
is commonly known as the Period of Recon- 
struction, he occupied a number of important 
public offices. At one time he was State 
Superintendent of Public Instruction, and as 
such his labors formed a valuable contribution 
to the public school system of Texas. Later 
he was made Reporter of the Supreme Court, 
and several volumes of its decisions still bear 



his name. His last public service was that 
of Superintendent of the State Institute for 
the Blind, which office he filled with conspic- 
uous ability and humanity, resigning its duties 
in April, 1874. 

In 1887, Mr. Wheelock organized a Unitarian 
Society in Spokane, Washington, and for two 
years served as its minister. He then re- 
turned to Texas, and, not long after, began 
his pastorate of the Unitarian movement in 
Austin, in which work he continued for eight 
years, when the gathering infirmities of age 
compelled his resignation. His death occurred 
at Austin on the 29th of October, 1901, in the 
midst of the people among whom his lot had 
so long been cast, and who, despite the bitter- 
ness left by the war, had learned to admire 
his intellect and to revere his character. 

At his death, Mr. Wheelock directed all his 
manuscripts to be destroyed. Fortunately, a 
number of his sermons and addresses had 
been published by the press and were thus 
preserved. The present work, too, had been 
privately printed in earlier years for circulation 
among friends and a few copies were found 
among the author's papers. 

CHARLES KASSEL. 

Fort Worth, Texas, July, 1908. 



PROTEUS. 

SOME twenty- three centuries ago lived 
Plato, the great thinker of antiquity. 
His divine imagination gave him a glimpse 
of truths which science has groped after 
for two thousand years. In his "Hymn 
of the Universe, ,, which is the highest ut- 
terance, perhaps, that comes to us from 
the pre-Christian ages, he designates man 
as the "microcosm," or epitome of the 
universe, thereby anticipating one of the 
sublimest generalizations of modern sci- 
ence. 

Agassiz, the leading naturalist of our 
day, but re-echoed the thought of Plato, 
when he said, "Creation expresses the 
same thought from the earliest ages, on- 
ward, to the coming of man; whose ad- 
vent is already foretold in the first ap- 
pearance of the earliest fishes." 

For creation, from the first, has been 
in continued effort to put forth the hu- 



man form. Mineral, vegetable and animal 
forms, nay, atmospheres, planets, and 
suns, are nothing else than so many means 
and tendencies to man, on differing stages 
of his transit. He stands on the pyramid 
of being, linked with all below, as the 
form to which they all aspire. Man is 
the head and heart of nature. Creation is 
the coming and becoming of man. The 
world is, because he is. The reason of 
everything it contains is written in the 
book of human nature. He finds that 
reason physiologically in his body, and 
spiritually in his soul. 

Man is the presence before whom all 
limits disappear, the reservoir out of 
which wholeness and vitality well from 
perennial springs. He is the organism 
that thinks. Upon molecular life which 
is the mineral, growth life which is the 
vegetable, and instinctive life which is 
the animal, is founded a life of life, which 
is mind. The face of man thus travels 
through the universe, and love and intel- 
ligence look out from things with an in- 
finite variety, according to their capaci- 
ties. He cannot travel beyond himself, 



for the world is still within the compass 
of his being. The heights of Zion and the 
abysses of Hell are within him, and he is 
a pipe that runs with every wine. The 
living caryatid is he — the I AM, who not 
was, but is, in all things. There is a one- 
ness of principle pervading life, which re- 
solves itself into the omniprevalence of 
man. The wise man recognizes his own 
species wherever life is seen; this is true 
to the very mire. Humanity enfolds 
everything and is all-embracing. The ad- 
vent of man is the universe beckoning to 
the atom to come up among the stars. 

"His eyes dismount the highest star; 
He is, in little, all the spheres." 

All lower things are mute predictions 
of man. The sap of the tree foretells his 
blood, and the hoof of the quadruped pre- 
figures his hand. Prior to all worlds man 
is the oldest idea in the creation. Nothing 
was ever moulded into form that was 
not a prophecy of something to be after- 
wards unfolded in him. In him unite 
zoophyte and fish, monad and mammal, 
and he confesses this in bone and func- 



tion. The mouse is his fellow creature. 
The worms are his poor relations. Noth- 
ing walks, or creeps, or grows which he 
has not been in turn. The rock is man 
stratified; the plant, man vegetating; the 
reptile, man wriggling and squirming; 
to-morrow it will fly, walk or swim; the 
day after it will wear a neck-tie or a 
bonnet. 

Our Psyche fits on and wears each coat 
in nature's wardrobe, before it assumes 
the human incarnation. Nature is in the 
ascensive mood. In her studio, the crys- 
tal tends to become an inflorescence. "The 
fine floral activities, when freed from their 
leafy sheaths, collect to take on animal 
images, and the animal tends to the hu- 
man image." The unconscious effort and 
aspiration of all lower life, is to reach 
the human organism, that is implicated 
in the germ, and prefigured in the primal 
atom. Man is thus a universal form from 
the complex of creation, and the cosmos 
crosses him by its lines through every 
nerve. 

The human body feeds from, and is 
fed by, the whole of matter. The plant 



assimilates the mineral, the animal di- 
gests the plant, and all pass into man. 
Above the lowest nature each thing is 
eater and meat. In the snake all the 
organs lie sheathed; no hand, feet, fins 
or wings. In fish, bird and beast they 
are partly loosed and find some play. In 
man they are all freed, and full of action. 
The meanest animal does not stand iso- 
lated and forlorn. The brutes are kith 
and kin of those who rule over them. 
They are steps of our ascending pathway 
through nature, and every lower form 
proffers its torch to light up some obscure 
chamber in the faculties of man. And 
the climb of creation is a constant one. 
Scales are converted into feathers, gills 
into lungs, fins into hands, matter into 
force, atoms to thought, dust to brain, 
sap to soul. The universe runs manward 
from its source. Humanity, by its prin- 
ciples, extends through the realms of 
beasts and fishes, herbs and stones, and 
even through winds and the fluid worlds. 
There is no escape anywhere from man. 
If we fly to the uttermost parts of the 
earth on the wings of the morning, if we 



ascend into Heaven or make our bed in 
Hades, still he is there. 

Every madrepore and mollusk comes 
to its meridian through him, and to him 
their end, all things continually ascend. 
He is animated oxygen, breathing gran- 
ite, living clay. The planet itself has 
passed into man as bread into his body. 
There is nothing but is related to us, tree, 
sea shell, or crystal, the running river 
or the rustling corn ; the roots of all things 
are in man. "He was prefigured in the 
cystal and predicted in the plant. Pre- 
diction grew into prophecy in the reptile 
and bird. Prophecy became assurance in 
the ape. Assurance ripens into fulfilment 
in man." He is the high water mark of 
nature's tide. She speaks her latest or- 
ganic word in him. God willed the whole 
immensity of his creation into a single 
point; that point is mankind. 

"Man doth usurp all space, 
Stares thee in rock, bush, river, in the face. 
'Tis no sea thou seest in the sea, 
'Tis but a disguised humanity." 

Science watches the monad through all 
his masks, and detects, through all the 



troops of organized forms, the eternal 
unity. All feet fit into that footstep, and 
all things have passed that way. 

As man embodies nature, so does he 
reveal God, as the wave is a revelation of 
the sea. There is but one MAN in cause, 
that One whom we term God; there is but 
one form of man, and that man the one 
mankind, grouped by families of races, 
throughout all spaces of the one immen- 
sity, and all linked in the chain of univer- 
sal organic relations without limit or end. 

It was said, in the olden time, of the 
mythic Proteus that, to escape pursuit, 
he would assume all shapes. "First he 
became a lion with noble mane, then a 
dragon, and a leopard and a great bear, 
and then he became liquid water and a 
lofty leaved tree." By Proteus the an- 
cients symbolized man ; for he is not only 
man; he is all things, — every part of the 
universe in turn, as we change our point 
of view. Through him the very trees are 
not inanimate, nor the beasts without 
progress, but they breathe and walk after 
man down the line of ages, as after Or- 
pheus in the days of old. 



COSMIC UNITY. 

■pLATO had learned in Egypt that na- 
■"■ ture is all one piece. It is unity ex- 
pressed in variety. All her wardrobe is 
cut from one cloth. Rock, plant, animal 
and man have the same life, differing only 
in degree. Life belongs to the mineral as 
truly though not as distinctly as to the 
higher form. 

The lily has its degree of intelligence, 
for intelligence is as common as air, only 
some forms of life have more of it than 
others. The ant reasons and plans, there- 
fore he thinks. There are electricities 
that think and feel. Spirit precedes time 
and space, builds its own structure, and 
makes its own environment. The unity 
is so unbroken that the merest gnat car- 
ries on his back the key to the universe. 
Life, traced to its lowest terms, always 
discloses unity; whether in the stone, 
the clod, the growing tree, a herd of ani- 
mals or a host of men, it is the same gift. 
The universe is a single, unbroken ex- 



pression of that unity. That silvery spark- 
ler Venus is but a ball of dirt like our 
own globe. The sun has no fuel that the 
earth cannot duplicate; nor can Sirius or 
Jupiter impose upon us with any airs of 
superiority. 

A drop of maple syrup and a drop of 
human blood have their origin in the same 
corpuscle. The fungus and the oak on 
which it grows; the animalcule and the 
scientist who studies it, are alike one. The 
slime pushes up into the lily; the dung 
heap is transformed into the grape vine; 
from the refuse of the sink and the sewer 
come the tint of the pink and the odor of 
the rose. Filth and fertility are the same 
word. So we climb the creative ladder 
from weed to man. 

And more or less bulk signifies noth- 
ing. The earth is but an astral atom, 
The atom may contain a globe. Infini- 
tesimals are as huge as infinites. The 
world is wrapped up in the particle. The 
drop balances the sea. The sand grain 
is a masterpiece like the sun; the mite 
is mighty; and the mouse miraculous. 
The azure vault is but a floating islet of 



sun-crystals and star-crystals, knit to- 
gether by the same chemic law that binds 
the grains of the pebble. In every cob- 
web there is room for a planet. Through 
the egg and the orb stream the same laws, 
and the blood-globules in our veins dance 
to the same tune as asteroid and star. 

"Tis from the world of little things 
The ever-greatening Cosmos wings. 
The heaving earth, its rounded sphere, 
Began between a smile and tear." 

Smallest and greatest are wedded in 
nature; tied together by the thread of 
relation. For the universe is one; there 
is nothing outside it, it has no outside, 
and in its unity all is taken up. Every 
leaf on the maple, every swallow in the 
air is cousin and kinsman to the whole 
structure of life. From one minute cell 
another proceeds; from these others; and 
the result is a blade of grass, a lily, an 
oak, a pole-cat or a poet. From the cell 
come the fields, the forests, the animals, 
and the structure of man. But the whole 
universe becomes a party to this simple 
act of cell-growth. Before the rose can 
flower, or the daisy bloom, the sun and the 



earth are needed, with every golden ball in 
the sky. Cosmic unity runs on the broad 
roadway of law through all the worlds. 
Humanity was strictly implicated in 
the primal atom, imaged on the proto- 
plasm, and "intertwined with the whole 
chain of organic and inorganic being." In 
man is the first principle of the seed of all 
living things. He is rich with infinitesi- 
mal creations, and gay with every psy- 
chic bloom of mineral and metal, animal 
and plant. As, in the old world, all roads 
lead to Rome, so, from every object in 
nature go highways to man. He is the 
root and fibre whose bloom and fruitage 
is the world, and each thread in the web 
of universal being has its end in man's 
heart and brain. His faculties refer to 
natures out of him, and reveal the lower 
kingdoms through which he has arisen, 
even as the fins of the fish tell of water, 
or the wings of the eagle presuppose air. 
Step by step, through ages measureless 
by time, from particle and spicula, from 
cell and protoplasm, from plant, polyp 
and quadrumane, have we scaled crea- 
tion's altar stairs! 



We come, we go, through many cycles 
of successive births. Note the clear wit- 
ness that nature gives of this grand truth, 
in our pre-natal experience. The micro- 
cosm of the individual repeats to us, in 
little, the macrocosm of the race. In the 
gestative periods previous to birth, the 
forming human being runs rapidly through 
the whole gamut of changes that his an- 
cestors underwent in their progress up 
the zoological ladder. He passes through 
the several stages of cell, leaf, egg, worm, 
reptile, serpent, fish including gills, quad- 
ruped including tail, till he reaches the 
full human development. Thus, as the 
embryo man, he re-enacts the world-code, 
he epitomizes the history of the evolution 
of the race, and his growth in the womb 
is a condensed repetition of the process 
by which, through the long ages, the hu- 
man family came into the life of the 
world. In each germinal dot of human 
being blooms afresh the life of the race; 
the germ goes through the same round as 
the species, and the life of the babe has 
repeated the evolutionary experience of 
mankind. 



THE PSYCHE. 

TJUMANITY is builded on the king- 
■* * doms below, as coral isles and conti- 
nents rise into the red light of the sun from 
their subterrene basis. "Could we," said a 
great seer, "see a globule of our blood 
with a fine enough eye for character, we 
should find it was a chip of the old block, 
and inherited from hydatids and zoo- 
phytes." The vitals of man run through 
the world by permission from all natures, 
and his body is reared from the marrows 
and backbones of all below. Plant and 
tree, dove and butterfly, rotifer and mam- 
mifer, are but so many stages and breath- 
ing places of the psychical essence on its 
lengthened way to man. The Psyche is 
present even in the lowest forms. It ex- 
ists, but for want of fitting organs it is 
too feeble to be perceived by our faculties, 
and increase in mind-force only takes 
place with increase of organization. The 
pebble climbs to a rose, and the rose to 
a soul. Nature spent upon his sacred 



13 



form all the treasures which she had 
amassed during previous millenniums. 
All her strata went to compose him; all 
her prior races, from coral and infusoria, 
found their ripening in him. Fish, fossil 
and fungus have worked for him, and he 
enters into their labors. The universe 
itself is but a grand road for the progres- 
sion of souls. 

In nature, the stone can never become 
a plant, but at a certain period in the 
planet's evolution, the plant grew out of 
the stone. Life is an evolution of recip- 
ient forms one after another, while each 
such life is sustained by momentary out- 
pourings from the creative urn. Nature 
contains the forms and seeds of all life in 
potency, and brings them forth in orderly 
time, evolving these forms from proto- 
plasm to man. In this way the primal 
slime becomes life, becomes fish, bird, 
mammal, man, philosopher; but all this 
life flows from the divine Life, through 
every ancestral link, and is God's, not 
man's really, from end to end. Nature 
streams perpetually from God ; every atom 
even of her chaos is penetrated by an 



TT 



adequate mind; every granule is imped 
and winged. 

Life which is molecular in the mineral, 
growth in the plant, motion in the animal, 
and consciousness in the man, has grown 
from more to more. The potential soul 
has climbed from worm to seer, through 
planet haze and lambent globe, through 
leaf and bud, from chaos to the dawning 
morrow. This world-energy that moves 
through all things, this universe-power, 
this God-force that in us wells up as con- 
sciousness, as will, as love, is the same 
force by which the worlds were made. 
We, and the divine on-working energy 
of the spheres, are one. The great call 
toward perfection which vibrates in man's 
soul, is the same as the impetus with 
which the entirety of nature swings for- 
ward toward completed being. The Crea- 
tion is uni-verse — turned into one, and 
forever thrilled through and through by 
the God! 

Man is the true Joshua, who bridles the 
sun, and curbs the moon. He has the 
planet for his pedestal. His brain is a 
magnet running out threads of relation 



is 



through every clod and stone, acid and 
atom. The gases gather to compose his 
form, and the winds hold him in solu- 
tion. Said a great teacher, "He knows 
of ox, mastodon, and plant, because he 
has just come out of them, and part of 
the egg-shell still adheres. The plowman, 
the plow and the furrow are all of one 
stuff." 

"Shakespeare existed in potency in the 
sun," said Tyndall. It is true; man has 
traveled on the protoplastic railroad, over 
all chasms and up all gradients, from 
microbes to savants. 

Nature is filled to the very feet with 
the inflowing purposes of man. It is a 
universe of man and of nothing but man ; 
its arteries and veins from cell to soul 
run with humanity. He is the principle 
from which all derivations flow, and the 
world is the logic of which he is the 
Logos. He did not begin his existence 
with his organic birth. Innumerable were 
his successive births, and lives, and 
deaths before; for he has previously ex- 
isted in every type and form from chaos 
to mammal. Every step he takes is locked 



^r 



with the last and next. The promise and 
potency of all life is in the small dust of 
the balance. The ends of the earth are 
brought together, to be built into the 
temple of his body. His fingers are finer 
than tact. He feeds on time which feeds 
on all other things. Space and matter, 
irrespective of him, are so flimsy that 
thought goes through them as if there 
were nothing there. Time is not heard 
unless ticking in ourselves. The earth 
itself is coordinate with man, and in its 
own remoteness, human. 

All things are in the effort and throe to 
be promoted into man. He passes through 
the fingers of every herb and growing 
thing and is enriched by each. He drinks 
the atmosphere with the planet dissolved 
in it. In the stone or the plant is the 
Psyche first imprisoned that, later on, is 
to resound through history, and push the 
nations to their goal. In every form alike 
the Eternal God-seed comes and goes. It 
is germed in the earthly stone, and in- 
volved, bedecked, from all the shapes that 
in her kingdom dwell. 



17 



"Cocks crow, hens cackle, round the psyche- 
shell: 
Lambs bleat, wolves howl, the fierce, wild 
instincts play." 

Humanity is the sun and sum of crea- 
tion. There is nothing in the world but 
continuous man. He is the summit and 
measure of nature. The planet is pat- 
terned on him. His body epitomizes every 
earthly form and structure: his mind is 
instinct and brute intelligence ennobled 
and winged. The globe, from its first 
twirl in space, is nothing but man. The 
human idea was the purport and destiny 
of all animate life. The spirit of man is 
the inmost of it all. That spirit began 
with slender pulsation in the first feeble 
formations making their faint gestures of 
life. When spirit thus expressing itself 
in all material forms, arrives at a struc- 
ture in which it becomes self-conscious, 
man enters the universe. With his ad- 
vent, impulse ascends to reason, instinct 
blossoms into insight, longing expands 
into effort, providence is transmuted into 
perception, and blind vitality into moral 
choice. 



18 



MAN THE MICROCOSM. 

'PVERYTHING in nature points, like 
*"■■' the old signs of the zodiac, to some 
part of the human body; for man is the 
summing up of things. He is related to 
the furthest star. He is the builded and 
quickened aroma of the universe. He is the 
rhythm of the great Maker's plan. He is 
the central yolk of the world-egg, receiving 
and transmitting the rush of destiny. The 
sun and moon hang in the sky for him. 
For him the nebula cohered to an orb, 
and the long slow strata piled and slept. 
For him the globe lay preparing millions 
of years without animal or plant ; for him 
the upward and downward sun, and the 
ceaseless tides of the air. The stars moved 
aside in their rings to make room for him. 
Through all the chaos of the beginning 
his tender Psyche passed, taking no harm 
from the fiery gases. Vast vegetables 
clothed his germ; monstrous mammoths 
with care sheathed it in their hearts. All 



19 



mundane forces conspired to complete 
him, till he stands at the appointed ren- 
dezvous, — a soul ruling the world. 

Nature is an outgrowth from him, and 
takes his color and expression. Lands, 
seas and atmospheres are his sheddings. 
Mollusk, sauroid, and pachyderm are his 
heralds, going before the king to prepare 
his way and make his path straight. Not 
a breeze blows, not a wave beats, not an 
atom stirs on the most distant star, but 
the movement enters his body. Not a 
stone, or a plant, or a living creature but 
carries its heart-thread into his loom, 
there to be wound up into human nature, 
and thenceforth to follow his lead. 

Emerson says, "The divine forces were 
forming man in the gaseous chaos of the 
beginning, ere matter had rounded itself 
into light-giving orbs, or whirled off its 
rotating and balanced suns. Each par- 
ticle of oxygen, each atom of lime waited 
for him, ready to obey his thought. The 
earth, the water, and the air worked for 
him. The frost and the glacier were his 
plows. The gases massed themselves into 
huge mountain chains to serve his turn, 



and when, in the great day of creation, 
the hour for humanity struck at last, upon 
this crust of soil which the ages, and sea- 
sons, and forces had refined, Man, the 
Microcosm, is placed to govern matter as 
the organ of the Reason that made the 
world. ,, 

In the primal medley, or in chaos, so 
to speak, Creator and creature, ' God and 
man, are mingled and indistinguishable. 
All things are confusedly blent. It is a 
potpourri. The entire scope of evolution 
is to reduce this chaos to order; to lift 
this mute, melancholy and prostrate uni- 
verse into human personality. Mineral 
life is the first step towards this end. It is 
the arrest of chaos. It is the "Me" getting 
into position for its experience of growth 
in the vegetable forms, motion in the ani- 
mal, and action in the human form. The 
mineral marks the initial movement of 
the "Me" getting its rudimentary body, 
and protesting against the community of 
chaos. Did the "Me" not first wear this 
lowest form of resistance, it would never 
flower forth in the after and higher evo- 
lutions. Vegetable growth, animal mo- 



tion, human individuality but record the 
successive steps of triumph of that initial 
protest. 

It was said at the beginning of this 
paper, that the wiser ancients knew and 
taught that man was nature's microcosm. 
They also knew the law of evolution, 
which Darwin has but re-stated. They 
knew, for instance, that the idea, or 
psyche, or linear outline of man was la- 
tent in the horse, and was preparing for 
evolvement. From this comes the myth 
of the centaurs. It is a parable of evolu- 
tion. So the mermaid, the siren, the 
sphinx, and other supposed fables of the 
old pagan Mythos, are similar parables. 

Man is the Midgard-serpent in whom 
ends and beginnings meet, and who hoops 
the whole world round ; and he is not only 
the rim and circumference of nature, but 
he is a spiritual world also, and a set of 
miracles, if he so chooses, binding all ani- 
malities to his will. Suns and stars, 
churches and states, are his ordinances, 
and their solidity is of him. Ages and 
epochs are his nursing mothers. He is 
the only Melchizedek, without beginning 



or end of days. He always was — in God ; 
but he had to be created ; that is, distanced 
from the Creator in order that he may be 
a personal existence. So he was wire- 
drawn through all forms, beginning at the 
bottom. He must rise from the ranks. 
He must individualize, by the long climb 
of evolution, to gain for that personal 
being fixity and place. He must be sep- 
arated from the Creator by the whole 
breadth of the creation, and be veiled in 
matter. These lower forms are the base- 
ments to the Father's house of many man- 
sions, the granite concrete under the tem- 
ple of man. In itself the Psyche is an 
unbounded force, seeking perpetual ex- 
pansion, ready to break out into a chaos 
of passion and will. It needs restraints 
to shape it into orderly development, and 
to endow it, at last, with self-control. 
The long series of moulds or bodies, 
through which it ascends, furnish this 
curbing power, compressing the action of 
the soul into specific channels. Man's 
spiritual destiny is so sublime; his final 
blending with the Divine so intimate and 
complete, that he needs all this prelim- 



23 



inary experience of mineral, vegetable and 
animal existence, to give him the alpha- 
bet of self-consciousness, and to render 
him at last "solidaire" with God. 



*4 



VESTIGES OF THE ASCENT. 

OUR humanity has been evolved out of 
the lower and coarser types of life, and 
faces still hang out the sign of this ex- 
perience in the eagle or vulture beak, the 
bull-dog visage, the swinish or wolfish 
aspect. They gravitate to animality. The 
brute peers forth through seeming man- 
hood's face. "As the carnivora disappear 
from the forests they re-appear in our 
race. The ape and fox are in the drawing 
rooms, the lynx and hyena haunt the 
courts of law, the wolf commands a regi- 
ment, the gorilla is the king."* Animals 
are sentient structures in which the psy- 
chic germs, or human seed, are moving on 
the rounds of their long pilgrimage toward 
the human incarnation. We have trodden 
in all these rounds before. 

The present man has but stepped a 
little beyond the frontier of impersonal 
life. He is, as yet, but imperfectly and 
partially human, carrying much of the 

* "The Wedding Guest." 



25 



lime and slime of animalism on his shoul- 
ders. The present is rooted in the soil 
of the past, and worthier aeons build from 
ages gone. But slowly does the body for- 
get its heredity. We have worked the 
tiger out of our teeth and nails but he 
lingers in our passions. The mind is still 
toothed and fanged; the human hand re- 
tains the wild beast's claw; the human 
heart the beast's heart, with it blending. 
From the saurian to Shakespeare is but 
a step. 

Civilization does not so much remove 
and erase, as hide and cover. The former 
barbarian now goes clad in broadcloth, 
and looks very demure and decorous at 
church, but underneath his snowy linen 
you can still trace the primitive tattooing 
of the cannibal. Beneath this, again, are 
found the ear marks of animal heredity, 
the snake, the eagle, or the swine, and 
especially the universal and irrepressible 
donkey. His tuneful voice is heard, and 
his ears gracefully wave in our selectest 
circles. 

He is the man of shells and shards. He 
is crusted over with the bestial dross; 



26 



erect in form, on all-fours by the thought. 
The animal is horsed on man. The old 
brutehood lurks in each cerebellum, and 
the first savage that struggled with nature 
is still inside the last soul made. A four- 
footed lust is he, and if he looks at the 
universe at all, it is through a Jewish 
pin-hole. 

The lower creation is planted perma- 
nently in man. He has distanced what- 
ever is behind him, yet carries it all in 
him. He incorporates each fruit, root and 
grain, and is "stuccoed all over with quad- 
rupeds and birds." The snake slides 
through him and nests in his mouth. The 
predatory hawk peers out of his eyes. The 
mastodon retreats within his bones; nor 
are the wolf and the hog wanting. Every 
birth brought him new riches, and other 
births will enrich him more. 

True that we see all around us lamen- 
table faces. The nobler faculties of man 
sleep in their shell. This face is a bear's 
muzzle; that one a snout. This one is 
written over by a foulness that needs no 
label; that is gnawed by worms. Faces 
of apes through prelates may emerge. 



27 



Here is a rat, and there an abject thing 
cringing for leave to be! But all are 
deific. All can show their descent from 
the Lord. Beneath each haggard and 
mean disguise, the perfect Psyche pa- 
tiently waits. It will wear better gar- 
ments to-morrow. Yesterday ours were 
no better. What matter spots on the win- 
dow, if we know the master of the house 
stands within, sufficient and undisturbed. 
Man neither lags nor hastens, he takes 
his time and takes no hurt from it all. 
Through every change the Psyche re- 
mains safe, serene and beautiful. 



THE POTENTIAL GOD. 

TITE have been all things in turn. The 
* * snow, rain, atmosphere and sea ; the 
rock and the oak ; the coarse smut of beast, 
fish and plant, — all have we been. "We 
have prowled, fanged and four-footed in 
the woods." Through each product and 
influence of the globe v/e have circled and 
circled, till we have arrived at the form 
of man. From the time when we were 
sacs merely, floating with open mouths 
in the creative sea, to the present, when 
we have begun to be men, we have ex- 
haused trillions of winters and summers. 
There are trillions ahead of us, and 
trillions still ahead of them. So the soggy 
clod one day becomes a lover. If you are 
seeking man, look for him in the drain, 
on the door mat, or under your boot-soles. 
It is needful for the harmonious develop- 
ment of the soul, that all phases of mate- 
rial existence should be first passed 
through. In each stage of the long pro- 
cess, the outward form represents so 



29 



much of the unfoldment of the inherent 
and indwelling God, as its grade of life 
permits it to express. 

"The images called cherubim, which the 
eminent adept Moses caused to be fash- 
ioned for the rites he framed for the Jews, 
and that Solomon had afterwards carved 
to stand in the most sacred room of the 
temple; what were they but effigies of 
animals in various stages of ascension 
and transformation."* To a student of 
our science their significance is plain. 

Herodotus relates that the Egyptian 
priests held from the earliest ages, that 
the soul, before entering the human body, 
was clothed successively with the forms 
of all the animal genera, through which 
it slowly wrought its way to the human 
plan. Thus the science of to-day has but 
re-discovered a truth which was known 
to ancient philosophy before the Indo- 
European had entered Europe. 

"Go where we will, through the obscure 
and almost obliterated paths of the myth- 
ologies of the old and still elder times; 
covered by the fallen leaves, heaped over 

* "The Wisdom of the Adepts." 



30 



by the sandstorms of the ages, we shall 
discover images partially animal, par- 
tially man ; the fish-man, the reptile-man, 
the bird-man, the brute-man; the human 
form and feature struggling outward 
through the inferior disguise." This was 
their way of stating the eternal climb of 
all lower life into human nature. What 
the moderns indicate in the terms of sci- 
ence, the ancients expressed by symbol 
and figure ; each following the bent of its 
own genius. 

The forms of life we see about us are 
the results of an endless series of embodi- 
ments. The animal re-appears in a 
lengthened chain of births, each clothing 
the Psyche in an improved form. Im- 
mense and unwieldy beasts, reptiles 
longer than the mountain pine, and birds 
tall as the giraffe, lived in the Saurian 
ages. They live again in our present ani- 
mal races. 

Obeying the innate tendency in nature 
to the higher rounds, the Psyche of the 
extinct plesiosaur or mammoth is now the 
spirit of the eagle, the horse, or dog, and 
will be the spirit of the man. When it 



31 



was a clumsy, wallowing, titanic saurian, 
huge in size and coarse in fibre, but a 
single remove from the vegetable, and 
moved only by the desire to eat and di- 
gest, it dimly felt its twenty tons of flesh 
and bone as a clog; it aspired toward 
differentiation ; it floundered after a higher 
structure; it sprawled and wallowed 
toward symmetry along the ages; and 
through the long series of advancing 
forms that it has since shaped and worn 
in the cycle of the Millenaids, this ruling 
instinct was an active force slowly mould- 
ing the form. We find this longing still 
expressive to-day in the universal aspira- 
tion of our humanity for a better and 
finer incarnation, for matter is the pre- 
cipitate of mind; nature the sediment of 
soul. Said the Hebrew teacher, "Who 
will deliver me from the body of this 
death?" — voicing thus our desire for a 
less crass and clogging investiture, — a 
desire which, in the future as in the past, 
is the prophet of its own fulfilment. 

This is the ideal dream of humanity, 
presaging the sure destiny of the race. 
In this divine passion for a higher human 



32 



structure, man feels his infinity and eter- 
nity, and anticipates the hour of his full 
deliverance, when that which is in part 
shall be done away. We long for our re- 
demption and enlargement in God. 

In the lower forms unlikeness travels 
into likeness as they approach the human 
goal. The human structure is emanci- 
pation from the prison-house of the in- 
ferior creatures. In it we are on an end- 
less upward stair, and no fixed state lasts 
beyond its place and time. Manhood is 
a ladder of infinites. The animals are our 
younger selves. They are rudimentary 
man. All creatures are incarnations, in 
different degrees, of one and the same 
universal soul. Man is potential God. 

Humanity is the one universal form to 
which all living things are but the differ- 
ing steps of ascent. The chief religious 
symbol of Egypt, the sphinx, was an em- 
bodiment of this truth. The sphinx in 
picturing the lowest as linked to the high- 
est — the loins of the lion to the head and 
breast of the woman, — reveals the method 
of ascension, under differentiation, of the 
seed of the soul. Through change, by a 



33 



secret Providence, the planet is fitting to 
upbear a grander style of manhood. The 
infinite spiritual Psyche within us, im- 
prisoned through the ages, will be set 
free in our nature. For this, the primi- 
tive forests and their peoples have been 
shedding their frames, in unreckoned gen- 
erations. For this the little flowers have 
been working since the first were self- 
sown from the miraculous gardens of 
Spirit. For this, an aboriginal savage 
tenantry lease as hunters the future corn- 
lands of civilization. The human body, 
also fallow and in great part tenantless, 
like the planet, will become the micro- 
cosm of a new mind, burning with super- 
nal fire to make us more and more from 
the dust of the earth into the image and 
likeness of the Divine Heart. 



34 



NATURE AND SPIRIT. 

TN his royal passage from chaos to cos- 
^ mos, from clod to God, from the cell 
or the sponge to the radiant globe of 
reason in the human head, or the well- 
spring of love in the human heart, the 
unfolding Psyche leaps over no point; 
for man is born by many births. He 
takes the long ladder round by round. 
He slides, creeps, flies, rides on the spider 
and the beetle, sleeps with the sloth, 
swims with the fish, skims the air with 
the bird, tramps heavily on with the be- 
hemoth, grins and gossips with the mon- 
key, hunts with the lion, and whatever 
form he is using becomes sanctified by 
his indwelling. He travels with a whole 
menagerie in his cerebellum, and in him 
the Creator brings all his dumb creatures 
under one roof. 

He is the true ark of Noah, in which 
all the lower natures are housed. He 
groups all the lesser material forms in his 
body, while he presages the higher life 



35 



of the spiritual in his soul. He is the 
Jacob's ladder, of many rounds, stretch- 
ing from lowest earth to sky. He was 
the aim and dream of nature from the be- 
ginning. He was her target; but she did 
not hit the white till a million centuries 
had ripened her skill. Indeed she has 
not yet evolved the true and permanent 
type of humanity for which she has been 
striving. In her great workshop of the 
planet she has slowly felt her way; built 
and broken many a clay model; re- 
sketched and re-written her secret 
thought; till after a thousand millen- 
niums, man appears, note book in hand, 
and begins to ask of his origin. 

We have all lived as animal, bird, 
snake, insect, plant. Our primal atom 
has been washed on the ocean's bottom, 
frozen in icebergs, and scorched in vol- 
canoes. In one form or another we have 
gone on and up, gaining by each change 
in intelligence and force, until now we 
stand here — at the half-way house of ani- 
mal manhood. 

"Man," said Goethe, "is the first dia- 
logue that Nature held with God." This 



36 



is true. For in man the Creator hears the 
close-kept secret of his own personality 
told into all ears. In the lower animal 
forms the Infinite, muffled and disguised, 
incognito, roams through the streets of 
his creation; but in man the mask falls, 
the cloak drops, and the glad universe ex- 
claims "Eureka!" 

For the creation is God disappearing in 
material life, to come forth as man. God 
lost in the forest of forms, till found again 
in the human advent. Each of us is a bit 
of Deity framed in matter and wrapped 
in time. Each man is a hint of God, as 
the wave is a hint of the sea. Nature is 
the "involution" of spirit in matter. His- 
tory is the human evolution of the God- 
head. Each little child, like the Holy Babe 
of Bethlehem, intercedes for every person 
born; for God without and God within 
are one, the Son of Man is evolution, and 
the babe in the manger is the Lord from 
the skies! 

There is no God for the earth-man 
now, but the God in man. The prayer 
for the far God falls spent upon the 
breast, for nigh at hand, in every brother, 



37 



moves the Grand Sweet Presence. God 
meets us in the sanctuary of ourselves. 
He is incarnate. He makes residence in 
us. 

Where man is, there is the present 
Master of life. His forces come up from 
the center, and come down from the sky. 
All gospels lie in him. From his two 
hands all tools are born, all arts proceed. 
The world becomes his shadow to chase 
his footsteps. The words of his mouth 
are echoed in empires and civilizations. 
His gestures rise into religion. His heart 
heaves with the hope of the universe; 
for man is the autograph of God, and 
carries the Judgment Day in his forehead. 

He is the acme of things done, the seed 
of things to be. Cycles floated his cradle. 
Aeons waited on his baby steps. His 
callow youth fills all the spheres, and 
stretches from clod to God. Older he 
than solid soil or floating wave. He is 
the root of all that has grown, and out of 
his soul come all the Bibles; the leaves 
are not more shed from the trees than 
they are shed from the deep heart of man. 
The hinge of his hand, the lift of his eye- 



38 



lid, puts all machinery to scorn. His open 
palms cover continents. He outspeeds 
the wide sweep of Uranus, and plucks 
the swift comet by the flowing beard. He 
passes all boundary lines; fetters fall, 
gashes heal, corpses rise on his way to 
the Supreme. 



39 



GOD IN MAN. 

*T^HIS earth of ours that looks so fresh 
■* and sweet, is in fact an old graveyard, 
— a huge cemetery, one sepulchre, where 
we tread on skulls at every step. Our 
past burials strew the world. Its very 
soil is a concrete of dead organisms. The 
primeval oceans left a first deposit of their 
minute forms of life. The rivers tore the 
hillsides and ran down with their silt. 
The glacier with its blue plowshare deeply 
furrowed the landscape, and on the sur- 
face thus gained, the skies shed their 
rains, the ethers lent their thrill, and the 
mighty ferment of animate nature began. 
Then came the slow, long, unceasing 
effort to evolve man ; for he is a measure- 
less presence, whose roots run out and 
down to every sweet and bitter thing, 
from the metal to the gas, from the violet 
to the vine. His body rolls along, with 
the orb, kneaded together out of her 
juices and her clay. He is as much har- 



40 



nessed to matter as fish or dog, only with 
a larger arc. He stands waist deep in 
matter as in a swamp. He is glued to 
nature. He is caught, like the bedraggled 
fly, in the viscid fluidity of things. Both 
his feet branch down into roots that share 
the universal life, with the grass and the 
tree. He finds a Bible in each daisy at 
the door. His heart beats in the slender 
pulsations of the jelly-fish. He has worn 
in his evolution the whole vesture of life, 
a vesture woven without seam from top 
to bottom, stretching from pit to pinnacle, 
from angleworm to angel, from sponge 
to spirit, from protoplasm to prophet! 

All the animals came to Adam to be 
named. That is, the body of man is fur- 
nished with the instincts of all the herds 
and droves, and the human mind is built 
up out of all the animal aspirations. Each 
animal as he came brought to Adam to- 
kens of himself — tokens that he had 
dropped as he passed that way long ages 
ago. 

The tree is an unconscious person. It 
is an individual, and knows it not. Man 
is such and knows it. Consciousness is 



41 



the root of personality. The ideal, which 
in the lower organism is silent, becomes 
vocal and says "I" ; that "I" made religion 
and founded science; that "I" holds civili- 
zation in the one hand, and immortality 
in the other. The animal is tied hard and 
fast to his instincts. He cannot turn 
round in his track and face himself. But 
man's self detaches itself to look itself 
in the face. The animal while he knows, 
does not know that he knows. He does 
not think back over his own thoughts. 
He sees, but does not see that he sees. 
He acts, but does not react. His nature 
has no returning stroke; man alone has 
the faculty that looks before and after. 
He alone has spontaneity, and lower 
forms are but the stuttering prophecy of 
that unmatched perfection. God made 
man in his own image, and then he made 
the universe in the image of man. 

I said that nature speaks her latest or- 
ganic word in the present human type. 
Her latest, by no means her last. The 
man-ape fulfilled his day, and made way 
for the ape-man, hair-clad and speechless, 
arboreal and impersonal, with a muzzle 



42 



for a face ; who, in turn, gave place to the 
present compound of animal and man. Is 
he a finality? No, there are no finalities. 
There is no halt in the movement of the 
cosmos. Each end in nature is also a 
beginning. All phases and manifesta- 
tions in life expire at the end of their use, 
and fulfilment of their term. Nothing 
remains in the unchanged appearance. 
When a form has accomplished the end 
for which it was designed, it passes away 
to make room for higher structures. This 
is the law of life. 

As each advance in the lengthened chain 
of being was not a stationary summit, 
but merely a base from which the next 
step was taken, "so the present type of 
egoistic mankind, which has less apti- 
tude for orderly association than the in- 
sects in an anthill, which presumes to 
quarrel and butcher on this globe till it 
reeks like an abattoir, and is an offense 
in the nostrils of the universe; this crea- 
ture whose history is made up of frauds, 
treacheries, disputes, and murders, from 
the beginning of recorded time, is by no 
means nature's true or ideal man, but only 



43 



a coarse approximation."* Nature has 
only endured him at all because he is this 
approximation, and serves as a base for 
evolving a creature more truly human, 
a more filial offspring of the Most High, 
a race built on altruism as we on egoism, 
and so above the plane of sin, or disease, 
and of natural mortality. 

The wide interval between the ape-man 
and the true androgynous being could 
not be taken at a stride, so nature fills the 
gap with the egoistic man. He serves 
her turn, and though a makeshift, is not 
a failure when looked at only as an ap- 
proach to ideal manhood, — as a pontoon 
thrown across the chaos for the moment. 
To form him, she epitomized and con- 
densed the tremendous instincts of the 
passionality of the creation, and drew 
over it a human skin. Thus he is an ap- 
parition; a seeming man, made in the 
image and likeness of God, but not in the 
Divine reality. He stands in the strict 
law and line of evolution ; he is a massing 
together of all the possibilities of the 
lower types of life; to serve as a base, 

* "The Golden Child." 



for the creation upon it and in it, of the 
human personality in the spiritual degree. 

We are but fractional men, semi-hu- 
man; a large remainder of deposit in our 
structures is animal or inhuman, and from 
this come all our miseries, all our dis- 
eases, all our sins ; for the law of the ani- 
mal, whether in or out of the human skin, 
is egoism. Here is the origin of evil, and 
here its cure. 

When the cause of evil is removed by 
evolution, the effects disappear. It is hard 
for a man to reconcile the existence of 
evil with the goodness of the Creator, but 
the mystery is of our own making. Evil 
is simply and solely the law of the lower 
creatures, which is egoism, ruling in man. 
Egoism is not evil in the animal, for it is 
his law ; but when it rises into the higher 
structure and usurps the place of the 
divine principle, altruism, it becomes evil 
and that continually. Evil and sin are 
features of animal heredity which man is 
learning to outgrow. They are the pro- 
pensities which have "held over" in him 
in his upward progress. They are the 



45 



remnants of an inferior grade of being 
and a lower order of life. 

The God in us is climbing still. In the 
final victory of altruism, in the coming 
round of cosmical evolution, lies the long 
predicted redemption and the deliverance 
of the race. In the present mankind, 
humanity is like the silver ore in a min- 
eral vein, mixed with dross and scoria, 
rock and refuse. Nature in her next assay 
will bring out from the crucible of evolu- 
tion the pure metal of man, like silver 
thrice refined. 

Out of the lowliest forms man has come 
to be something, and will come to be 
much more. He is at the end of a long 
series of forms, through whose natural 
gradations he has passed, each stage of 
which has been towards a higher trans- 
formation. Providence was at every point 
of the long ascending way, and still 
pushes him on; for he is yet tethered to 
the soil whence his body came, and much 
earthly stratification loads the flesh of 
his heart. In the present stage of evolu- 
tion we are but human animals who pa- 
rade as men. Much of the human struc- 



46 



ture is a legacy from inferior organisms, 
which, in our next advent, we shall make 
superfluous. 

The ape has not died out of man; he 
has only gone in ; he is closeted and lurk- 
ing in each. He reappears in the fan- 
tastic tricks of boys, and ill-bred or 
shoddy people; he survives morally, and 
the impish chatter of his resistance is 
heard at each step of the human advance. 

Every dog has his day, but the longest 
dog-day comes to an end, and the auto- 
crat of the planet is in his sunset hour. 
When the new departure begins, then — 
"Exeunt Omnes !" The present man will 
enrich with his bones the great fossil 
collection of species, and vanish. The 
frail human ephemera, of which we are 
molecules, having cleared the way for the 
appearance of the higher form of the hu- 
man family, for which the age is waiting ; 
for the manifestation of the true, altru- 
istic, spiritual, androgynous man; must 
take its place in the long line of human 
approximations, and make room for the 
electro-vital people. Nature is hungry 
for a new mankind. 



47 



But we go only to return, as we have 
gone and returned a myriad times before. 
The souls of to-morrow are the further 
evolved souls of to-day. The past we 
have been, the present we are, the future 
we will be. 

We were once the man-animal, we are 
now the animal-man ; we will be the arch- 
natural or electro-vital humanity. This 
will be nature's bloom and darling. This 
her paragon. This her Olympian group. 
This her wood-god Pan 

The coming era in the divine evolution 
of the race, is the ascension and trans- 
formation of the type, by the shedding 
of the animal and the assumption of the 
arch-natural. Then the bestial in the 
human will show no more. Then the 
sublimed atoms of our forms will be plas- 
tic to the word of our spirits, and be 
capable of dissipation and reconstruction 
at will 

Mother Earth awaits her new and bet- 
ter humanity, as she once waited for her 
first-born rose ! . . . . 

Man in nature is the fellow of the 
worm, an insect of the night. There are 



48 



men higher than the present man, for the 
human is a traveling form which reaches 
from man to God, and involves all beings 
as it goes, but the man on the highest 
plane is more man than he on the lower. 
Man is not limited by being a man, what 
cramps him is that he is not a man. He 
has passed through the kingdoms of the 
beast, the plant, the mineral, of the winds 
and the ethers ; he is now passing through 
this human-animal race, which marks the 
close of a long growth-cycle, and he will 
constitute the next step in evolution's 
endless climb — the divine manhood of the 
better day. 

The coming race will be open men, who 
will not hinder God so much as we. Racial 
development begins to make plain the 
travesty of man that man has been; to 
show how inexpressibly unhuman man- 
kind can be 

The hour brings the man. He knows 
his own and is known of them. He sits 
"in the still commune of the Holy Ghost," 
waiting the moment of manifestation. 
The promise will not fail, nor the great 
vision, hid for many days. 



49 



"We are but the tools and scaffoldings of men, 
The lines, the sketch, — He is the very thing." 

The elimination of the body and 

spirit of the ego, the self-life, from the 
structures of the human constitution, will 
be the outcome of the next wave of evo- 
lution. Altruism then becomes the law 
of human nature, and evil vanishes as a 
scroll. This is the coming of the kingdom 
of God, or the kingdom of Heaven, which 
Jesus announced and was, and which 
seemed to Him about to dawn upon the 
earth at that time ; for the Divine Vision 
takes no note of time, and a thousand 
years are to it as one day. This will also 
be the woman's hour, when the legends 
of Eve and Pandora are replaced by a 
healthier scripture. It involves a new 
growth for the aged earth, a new nature 
teeming with lovelier and loftier races, 
and a new genesis for man. None dream 
how fair man's coming state will be. 

On an ancient page, the words are writ- 
ten, "I saw a new heaven and a new 
earth, for the first heaven and first earth 
were passed away." It was the opinion of 
an incipient adept, whose writings are 



So 



held of high repute, that the new mankind 
who are to inhabit the new earth of our 
planet, would possess transfigured forms. 
He termed these celestial bodies. There 
are, says he, bodies celestial and bodies 
terrestrial, but the celestial has one glory 
and the terrestrial another, for this mortal 
must put on immortality, that mortality 
may be swallowed up of life. In these 
thoughts, he touched the fringe of the 
higher evolution that impends, for upon 
the verge of the conclusion of a grand 
world-cycle, this partially human race 
stands balanced to-day. This orb, during 
the long period of periods for which its 
life has been in process, has rounded its 
cycle of labor, and is about to pass into 
Devachan. 

We are hearing now the Musician's fit- 
ful preluding before the divine strain be- 
gins. Then dawns the new era, when 
mankind will be equal to its destiny, and 
its collective life will be concord and song. 
Then Eden, Redemption, the Golden Age, 
and Kingdom of God, will all be fulfilled 
in man. 



51 



APPENDIX. 

TN justice to Mr. Wheelock's memory 
■*■ it must be confessed that a few para- 
graphs have been here omitted which, 
however, may have been very dear visions 
to our poet. They appear on pages 28-31 
of the first edition, and in the present vol- 
ume their omission is indicated by dots. 
They read as follows: 

"They will levitate as easily as we tumble, 
sprawl, and gravitate. Instead of being stuck 
fast in the mud and mush of things, they will 
slip the tether at will, and visit Saturn or Sirius 
as we London or New York. In them the mind 
is not confined to a cerebral dot, but is in 
every part of the body. The hidden space of 
the fourth dimension opens to them, as the 
third to us; for the outlines of their forms 
transpose at will from the third to the fourth 
proportion of space. The air belongs to their 
feet by the leading of Him who has ascended 
already, and trod the lightness of the crystal 
climes " 

"The first man was man-woman, and was 



52 



married to himself. He was an androgyne, 
bearing within himself the counterpartal 
spouse; but he could not keep his high poise, 
and thus came the fall, or rather the sprawl, 
of man. The second Adam was, according to 
the highest mystics, not simply Jesus, but 
Jesus-Jessa, thus the adequate type of the 
manifested Divine. So is the true human race 
bi-sexual, the man with the woman, and neither 
alone. Male and female are in every soul, 
and when each becomes either, sex disappears 
and fruition stands in place of vague fore- 
telling " 

"They will neither sin, sicken, nor die, but 
at the term of their earthly days, rise by trans- 
lation, as was written of the adept Elijah, and 

realized by the Son of Man " 

"....and to be dimly aware of the difference 
between the bi-humanness to which we tend, 
and the monstrosity of our past condition. 
Mankind will, in the era now opening, attain 
the full androgynous constitution which be- 
longs to beings truly human. They will as- 
similate the vast God-forces discharged upon 
the unconscious structures of the race nearly 
two thousand years ago. Love's martyrs shed 
through earth to its quick heart, an essence 
rare that mingles now even with the meanest 
things. Already men and women are beginning 
to know themselves as biune, and to rule their 
lives by the high-flowing seas of sentiment and 
power that arise in this biunity. They press 



53 



toward an unknown condition of higher hu- 
manness. Our time begins the time which will 
fulfil all that was true in predictions and ideal- 
isms, when the separated beings that have 
peopled earth, the man-halves and woman- 
halves of personality, shall possess their sus- 
pended humanity. 

Nor is the Hero and Leader wanting to hu- 
manity in this advancing change " 

"The electro-vital body is not nebulous, hazy, 
cloud-like. It is possessed of far more ex- 
quisite sensitives than the present natural; a 
sweeter flesh, a richer blood, a nobler nerve- 
fluid. If we should happen to meet such a one 
in our walks, we would say, His corruptible 
has put on the incorruptible, and his mortal 
the immortality; but we would also say, 'Yet 
he is not a spirit, for spirit has not flesh and 
bones as he has.' In them the protoplasm of 
the human frame will effloresce to a fineness 
of materiality, as far transcending the quality 
of the highest present man, as he is differenced 
from the lowest savage, and of them will it be 
said, 'What manner of men are these, that the 
winds and the seas obey them?' " 

On page 51 "transfigured forms" reads 
in Mr. Wheelock's original, "forms of 
electro-vital flesh." 

Mr. Wheelock concludes his little book 
with this poem: 



54 



"When the Perfect Man is come 
Earth and Heaven shall be his home; 
In alternate periods, he 
In them both shall seem to be. 
Heaven by night and Earth by day, 
Shall behold his wonder way. 

"With material senses fine 
He shall dwell in space and time, 
And shall be a separate part 
Of Great Nature's Mother-heart. 
In his veins the Sun shall glow, 
In his pulse the Earth-life flow. 

"All that lives and all that feels 
Utter to his heart appeals; 
Speaking in a separate tongue, 
Voicing wisdom ever young. 

"His great sympathy shall flow 
Through all forms of life below; 
Flowers and Birds shall talk for him, 
And the stars that overswim 
Through their heaven revealing eyes 
Utter speech of Paradise. 

"Largely gifted, largely blest, 
Of the world and sky possessed, 
He shall be great Nature's heir — 
Lord of Earth and Sea and Air. 
Like a benediction dwell, 
Doing all things wise and well. 



55 



"There shall be no sickness then; 
Health shall weave her anadem: 
Music fall from heaven like rain, 
Birth be free from Mother-pain. 
Earth that now in wide extremes 
Fever flushed or frozen seems, 
Like the human soul shall be 
Modulated harmony." 

("Lyric of the Morning Land.") 

^ % % 

Mr. Wheelock's mysticism is no doubt 
one source of his poetic vision, but we will 
state here without reserve that in some 
points it is carried to excess when we 
must look upon it as fantastical and reach- 
ing out to opinions stated in serious 
naivete which can hardly be deemed com- 
mendable before the tribunal of sober rea- 
son. Mr. Wheelock claims in the above 
portions of his "Proteus" that man will 
acquire in the future course of his evolu- 
tion an incorruptible body made up of 
electric vitality in which shape he will 
attain immortality. 

Apparently the love of mysticism 
blinds Mr. Wheelock's critical faculty to 
an unjustified extent and makes him no 



56 



longer a safe guide in some of his bold 
flights. 

While considering how a man of his 
erudition can still hanker after so im- 
possible a dream we appreciate the more 
the straightforward and convincing way 
in which the great founder of the Bud- 
dhist faith cut off all the yearning for a 
bodily immortality by incorporating into 
the main tenets of the confession of faith 
the simple proposition that "all compound 
things are subject to dissolution," which 
implies that everything that has a be- 
ginning will have an end and that the 
immortal is only that which is uncreate 
and existed from eternity without hav- 
ing originated. 

Mr. Wheelock's mysticism boldly takes 
the consequences of his belief in a body 
that has put on the incorruptible. If hu- 
man beings will no longer die there will 
be no generation, no marriage, nor being 
given in marriage. Accordingly the trans- 
figured body of the future will surmount 
the imperfections of our present limita- 
tions in such a way as to transcend the 



57 



contrast of male and female, merging the 
two into an androgynous constitution. 

While we can not follow Mr. Wheelock 
in these mystic dreams of his fertile im- 
agination we gladly recognize the power 
of his poetry and expect that our readers 
will be grateful for the opportunity to be- 
come acquainted with this singular per- 
sonality. His very eccentricities are note- 
worthy in that they characterize certain 
aspirations and hopes of man whose very 
fulfilment runs contrary to the well as- 
sured verdicts of rational argument. 



We have only to add that the division 
into chapters has been made for this edi- 
tion and the secondary title, "A Rhap- 
sody on Man," is also added for the first 
time. 

PAUL CARUS. 



58 



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